Topic:planets

With narration by Carl Sagan, borrowed from an audio recording of his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, this is Wanderers, a bold science fiction short by digital artist and animator Erik...

What is retrograde motion and why does a planet like Mars appear to change directions in the night sky? Is it playfully looping about in its orbit around the sun or is something less strange going on? From episode 2 o...

This video truly illustrates why our Earth is called The Blue Marble. Taken every 30 minutes over Indian ocean from May 15th to May 19th, 2011, these images by the geostationary Elektro-L weather satellite have been c...

As NASA looks toward the New Horizons probe's July 2015 rendezvous with dwarf planet Pluto and its five known moons, they are also reviewing Voyager 2 data collected on the 1989 flyby of Neptune's moon Triton, seen he...

Take a (peacefully quiet) tour through and beyond our solar system to visit a neighboring brown dwarf -- a sort of failed star that's too large to be called a planet -- called W0855. A team of scientists, led by Carne...

Hexagon-shaped storms exist. There is a massive, persistent, hexagon-shaped jet stream on Saturn’s north pole -- "the perfect six-sided hurricane, 60 miles deep, that could swallow four Earths..."
The New York Tim...

When we wake up, eat breakfast, get ready for school or work, and head out the door, we may not be thinking about how incredibly unique our small, wet rock of a planet is. But the Earth is incredibly unique. Learn som...

Moon Saturn Occultation - 14 May 2014, captured 20 km north of Albury, New South Wales in Australia by space enthusiast and photographer Colin Legg. Occultation happens when "one object is hidden by another object tha...

An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system, and The Sanderson Orrery, above, is a beautiful Jules Verne-themed one. It comes complete with a steam engine, a time machine, and a pet dinosaur. The music is Moza...